Tag: Prof. Sunny Awhefeada

By Sunny Awhefeada     The title adopted for today’s piece is a slightly modified, if not imitative, version of how someone labeled a post on facebook two days ago. The post in question is a video in which a helpless civilian was being pummeled by soldiers in uniform under the watchful supervision of a major-general! The victim is neither a terrorist nor a bandit! He is just another civilian accused by power drunk soldiers of denting the jeep of the major-general. As the brutes in uniform rained blows on…

By Sunny Awhefeada   The title of this piece will tickle the memory of those familiar with the corpus of English Literature who must of necessity remember the title of Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Dickensian imagination was inspired or better put provoked by the kind of inveterate socio-economic malaise that is afflicting Nigeria at the moment. Dickens lived and wrote in an epoch of unimaginable social rot and grinding poverty. The social, economic and cultural milieu of the Victorian Age during which English fiction bloomed…

By Sunny Awhefeada     Part of the staple that formed and conditioned the consciousness of my generation was the monstrosity of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Before apartheid got dismantled in 1994, young people of my generation were active psychological participants in the events that led to the defeat of that inhumanly racist phenomenon. Our history books, literary texts, newspapers, films and other media brought apartheid and anti-apartheid engagements to us so regularly to the extent that the events, the names of persons involved and the places where…

By Sunny Awhefeada Elementary social studies taught us that the essence of government was the welfare and security of the people. Government is that entity to whom the people surrender their freedom in exchange for protection. Before Western political thought birthed social contract as a concept, Africans if not people everywhere, had lived in organized societies and their lives were regulated, functional and fulfilled. People everywhere had their lore and mores before the imperial intrusion. The presence of an African civilization thousands of years ago attests to the socio-economic cum…

By Sunny Awhefeada,   The Ghanaian Yao Egblewogbe’s poem “The Coming of Day” speaks to the African predicament with a remarkable sense of irony. The imagery of day signifies hope and relief from the horrors of the night and colonialism was night in the configuration of the African experience. Those who led the anti-colonial struggle promised the people dawn and day. Egblewogbe’s country’s leading nationalist, Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, told Africans to “seek ye first the political kingdom and every other thing will be added onto you”. In the course of…